Search results

The status of government’s legal adviser in Israel is complicated and controversial. This status deeply impacts discretion and independence, especially in the role of combating corruption. This article aims to review the status, power and independence of the government’s legal adviser and his/her interaction with other legal institutions dealing with corruption cases.

The author argues that the period of the 1980s, in Israel, was characterized by prosecution’s activism because of the dramatically increased number of corruption-related cases.

Prominent government legal advisers formulated approaches to the struggle against political corruption in Israel; upon becoming justices of the supreme court, they successfully transited their prosecution mindset to judicial activism (and not only for corruption-related cases).

This article discovers a linkage between prosecution and judicial positions, not under the Israeli legislation but based on personal willingness to combat corruption.

How are social groups unmade? Current theories identify the symbolic power of the state as a primary factor in the creation of social groups. Drawing on Gramsci's The Southern Question, this chapter extends state-centered theories by exploring policies that are critical but under-theorized factors in group formation. These include the concession of material benefits as well as the use of coercive means. Further, while current theories focus on how social groups are made, a Gramscian perspective draws attention to how the state intervenes to prevent or neutralize group-making projects from below. This chapter explores a case of a decrease in national group solidarity. Specifically, this study explains how in the 1990s the Israeli state weakened national group formation among Palestinians by adopting two spatially distinct but coordinated strategies. First, the rearrangement of the military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank through the establishment of an authority of self-rule (the Palestinian Authority) demobilized and divided Palestinian residents of the Occupied Territories, especially along class-cum-moral lines. Second, state practices and discourses centered on citizenship rights shifted the center of political activism among Palestinian citizens of Israel toward citizenship issues. I argue that these two routes, which I call the indirect rule route and the civil society route, were complementary components of a broader attempt to neutralize Palestinian collective mobilization around nationhood. Despite recent changes and contestations, these two strategies of rule continue to affect group formation and to create distinct experiences of politics among Palestinians under Israeli rule. Analysis of the Palestinian–Israeli case shows that the state can unmake groups through the distribution of interrelated policies that are specific to certain categories of people and places. Understanding the conditions under which certain policies of inclusion or exclusion affect group formation requires going beyond the analytic primacy currently given to the symbolic power of the state.

This chapter examines changes in the kinds of American legal issues that have attracted international attention since the end of the Cold War and looks at the extent to which they have resulted in higher levels or new forms of foreign participation and interest in Supreme Court cases. Suggesting that these changes may have an impact, at least indirectly, on the Court in ways not adequately explored in the existing literature, it considers their possible effects on its decisions and the way that the justices consider their role within increasingly globalized legal networks.

The formality of modern law is a constitutive element in its operation, but the “revolt against formalism” and the charge of mechanical jurisprudence are also as old as the law. This chapter focuses on formalism in legal decision-making in hard cases and assumes that contemporary decision-making in law combines formalistic with nonformalistic expressions as part of its routine operation. The research develops a sensitive multidimensional measure that will be used to evaluate legal texts by examining various vectors of formalism. It begins by exploring diverse jurisprudential cultures of formalism, which have developed mainly in American legal thought. Based on the historical analysis of cultures of formalism, the chapter continues to frame eight claims of formalism that have all been contested in legal writing. It proposes to examine the following parameters, based on these claims: (1) the introduction and framing of the legal question; (2) the use of extralegal arguments; (3) reliance on policy arguments and on legal principles; (4) reference to discretion and choice; (5) the relationship between what is presented as facts and what is presented as norms; (6) preservation of traditional boundaries in law; (7) the use of professional judicial rhetoric; (8) the gap between law in the books and law in action; and (9) judicial stability and institutional deference. Each of these parameters can be used to evaluate the level of formalism in a concrete text. The interplay between diverse evaluations of the same case is a subject for inquiry and contemplation. These parameters can also be redefined as variables for a quantitative content analysis, and legal decisions can be coded accordingly. This will enable an analysis of differences between justices, legal issues, legal jurisdictions, and time frames, as well as the correlation between the various parameters of formalism. The tendency to formalism, according to the analysis here, is never pure and is part of a complex legal culture that usually combines formalistic elements with nonformalistic ones.

This paper argues that Charles Reznikoff’s autobiography, Family Chronicle: An Odyssey from Russia to America, presents Jewish law as an ethical alternative to U.S. law. The autobiography illustrates how Jewish law refuses to let social and economic hierarchies compromise its emphasis on truth-finding and the speedy resolution of legal troubles. Family Chronicle tragically portrays the Reznikoff family’s inability to exert equal bargaining power with its landlords, something commercial lease law assumes they can do. Reznikoff’s autobiography suggests that the United States can better realize its democratic principles by revising commercial lease law to reflect the tenant-centered approach of residential lease law.

The study aims to investigate the predictors of engaging in combat against the spread of misinformation and disinformation online, and of actively sharing disinformation by users. The study advances an understanding of user active engagement with disinformation as political participation, especially linked to violent activism, in alignment with the view of disinformation as political weapon.

A survey of 502 Israeli internet users inquired into respondents' political participation, trust and orientation, definitions and perceptions of “Fake News,” and previous engagement in sharing misinformation disinformation items, combating or intention to combat against the spread of disinformation.

In addition to identifying predictors for each practice, the findings indicate that sharing and combating against disinformation are closely linked. They are also all directly linked to political participation of various kinds. Most interestingly, working for a political party significantly correlates with knowingly sharing disinformation items, and participating in illegal or violent political activities significantly correlates with knowingly sharing and actively participating in combat against disinformation.

The spread of disinformation online and its implications has received much scholarly as well as public attention in recent years. However, the characteristics of individual users who share or combat against the spread of disinformation online, as forms of political participation, have not been examined. This study fills this gap by inquiring into such practices and the behaviors, perceptions and demographics that predict them.

On 1 April 1978, the Israeli peace movement burst into world consciousness when an estimated 25,000 Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv to urge the administration of Prime Minister Menachem Begin to continue peace negotiations with Egypt. A grassroots group called Peace Now is credited with organizing and leading that demonstration. Today, the “peace camp” refers to left‐wing political parties and organizations that hold dovish positions on the Arab‐Israeli conflict and the Palestinian issue. While some figures in the Labor Party view themselves as the peace movement's natural leader, political parties further to the left like the Citizens Rights Movement (CRM) and Mapam are more dovish. In the last 10 years, many grassroots peace organizations have, like Peace Now, formed outside the political party system, with the goal of influencing public opinion and eventually having an impact on policy makers. Peace Now is still the largest, most visible and influential of those organizations.